


Flies in Amber

by Mithen



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Post Gauda Prime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-08
Updated: 2010-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-07 03:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young boy growing up on Gauda Prime meets some unusual ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flies in Amber

i.

It was a foggy day when I first met him. I remember the tendrils of mist winding around the shaggy-barked trees as I ran, half-blinded with tears. However, I can't remember why exactly I was fleeing my family's farmhouse; some taunt or torment by my older brothers, I assume. I was a slight and dreamy six-year-old, and they seemed to take it as their personal responsibility to "toughen me up" and prepare me for the real world. The actual result was that I withdrew further and further from my family and spent more and more time haunting the old woods nearby.

In my blind run, I had tripped over a gnarled root and thumped into the ground where I lay, trying to catch my breath. As I shakily got to my feet again, I saw him sitting on a fallen, mossy log. He was watching me intently, his head cocked a little to the side. When he saw I was looking at him, he started to juggle acorns–first three, then four, then five. His face puckered with comic concentration, and I couldn't help laughing, a bit weakly. The cascade of acorns came to a stop and the juggler stood up, dusting his hands against his gray pants. "Feeling better, kid?" he asked, and I nodded. "What's a little chap like you doing out here?"

Sniffles threatened to rise up in my chest again, but I choked them down. He seemed sincerely interested, and I found myself pouring out my tragic tale of familial neglect–be honest, when you were six years old your troubles seemed unique to you too. He didn't give me any advice, but I felt better simply for having told a sympathetic soul. When I ran out of words, I started to remember my manners. I also noticed the fog had started to turn to rain.

"Won't you come back to my house? Ma will make us hot chocolate, I bet."

He looked vaguely around him. "Well, I guess that sounds good..." His voice trailed off and he followed me through the woods back to my house.

The house came into view as the rain started to come down in earnest. I saw my mother on the porch and ran to meet her, only to gain a twisted ear. "Haven't I told you a dozen times not to play in those woods? If you fall into one of those old bunkers and break your leg, don't you come running to me!"

"Ma!" I squirmed futilely in her grasp. "I met a nice man in the woods, can you make him some chocolate?"

"What?" She stared at me, even more so when I gestured at my juggler, who was standing in the rain with a small, almost puzzled smile on his face. "Dal, there's no one out there, you foolish child."

I wrenched away from her and stared at my friend, noticing for the first time that the rain was falling steadily _through_ him. His smile became lopsided and apologetic, and he faded slowly away. His smile was the last part of him to vanish into the misty rain.

I suppose I should have been afraid to meet him again after that, but he was so patently harmless and friendly it was difficult to consider him dangerous. Besides, my family considered having "imaginary friends" another alarming sign of my abnormality, and the teasing and bullying picked up, although I wouldn't have considered that possible before. The quiet woods were full of sinkholes into ancient underground quarters, but they seemed safer and less treacherous than my own house, and the juggler was about the nicest adult I had ever met.

Eventually I met all of them. Of course, at the time I didn't conceive of it as "all of them," because I didn't realize there was any connection between them. They were mainly hesitant to talk about their past, except for the juggler. The stories they did tell were difficult to follow at best, because they seemed to have lost all ability to use proper names. It was hard to make sense of a story that started off with: "So he was feeling bad that he had died, so he went off on his own. He wanted to leave him, and she wanted to stay, and she and I didn't know quite what to think, but I don't think he ever really meant to leave him anyway..." It wasn't until two of them mentioned the same rock-eating spider that I began to realize they might have known each other before.

Besides, they all seemed to prefer listening to my stories. They never remembered me from meeting to meeting–to them, it was as if they had always just met me, and my stories were always new and interesting. They seemed caught in a perpetual limbo, eternally captured moments after some event none of them seemed quite able to remember. When I was young, I enjoyed having them always glad to see me. As I grew older, I began to pity them, and to think about how lonely one would have to be if one were happy to stumble across a small boy in the woods for company.

They seemed to appear according to my mood. As a small child, the juggler appeared most often. Later he and the two women were my most common companions. The blonde woman knew the plants and animals of the woods almost as well as I did, and loved finding berries or weaving grasses into baskets. The dark woman was my companion when I went hunting for small rodents with my makeshift slings or bows. She always enjoyed examining my "weaponry," as she called it, suggesting small improvements. One time she exclaimed in disgust, "How could you ever kill a man with something flimsy like that?" and the fierce look on her face startled me into remembering that she was no farmer or simple hunter.

As I grew into adolescence, I started to become uncomfortable more and more often around the two women. The days on which they were more clearly spirits were easy. For some reason, I had no problem dealing with them when translucent, or even when they were merely a sketchy form in the mists of the woods. But when they seemed almost solid, I found myself uncomfortable and awkward. The supple flow of their bodies and the grace of their hands made me uneasy, and I spent more time with the juggler and the two men with curly hair. The youngest man was a sympathetic listener when I talked about the young women–the more corporeal women–in my life.

The older one, with the scarred face, I saw more rarely. The first time I met him was when I was still a child and was practicing my homework in the woods–an oral recitation of part of "The Rebel Queen" cycle. He listened intently, his good eye narrowed, to the section about the Rebel Queen and her consort defeating the Serpent Empress, then peppered me with detailed questions about the government and politics of the saga. When I explained that Tyce and Bek had been dead for centuries–if indeed, they had ever existed–he became agitated, nearly frightened, and blinked out of existence suddenly. I didn't see him again for years, and when I did I was careful not to talk about history or legend much. We did have some long and free-wheeling discussions about ethics and philosophy, especially during my breaks from university.

I have said that none of them frightened me, but that's not exactly true. For a long time the Dark Man was a terrifying spectre for me, for all that I saw him rarely. He was just a presence glimpsed between trees, a muttering voice in the mist most of the time. The few times I did see him, he didn't seem to notice me as he stalked by. His eyes were scanning the area obsessively, wildly, but his gaze passed through me like I was another stump. As a small child, the bleakness in his eyes left me shivering, as if I had been brushed with a knife of ice.

As I grew older, the look in his eyes frightened me more instead of less. I learned to close my eyes and make myself small when I saw his shape among the trees. I could tell it wasn't me he was looking for, but the focus and desperation of his searching made him terrifying to me, at least until the night of my twenty-first birthday.

I was out wandering through the moonlit trees, mulling over–well, the details of the event aren't important, but it involved love, and stupidity, and loss (all mine). He was lying at the base of a large tree, his back propped up against it, looking up at the star-dense sky. Lost in thought, I nearly tripped over his dark shape, and I suppose I was too depressed to be alarmed by him that night.

He looked much less ominous at rest, I realized. His pale face seemed to be carved out of ivory in the moonlight, which also smoothed out some of the ravaged lines of pain and loss he usually bore. On impulse, I asked, "What are you looking at?" When he turned his eyes to me, I flinched away, expecting to be hit with that laser of intensity, but his eyes were merely slightly puzzled.

He smiled softly, as if to himself, then turned back to the sky. "Sol." He pointed up at one of a cluster of stars in the Two Cats constellation. "That's my home star. Sol. Approximately forty thousand lightyears from here." He let his hand drop back to the pine-needle strewn ground.

Without thinking, I asked, "You're not from Gauda Prime?" Then I cursed myself as his face emptied of anything but horror and pain. He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, looking around the clearing with the agonized, fixed stare he had always had before.

"Where is he?" he choked. "I have to find him, I have to tell him–tell them all–" He lurched forward, then pulled himself back around to face me. With a desperate, threadbare politeness more horrifying than his mania, he said, "Excuse me, please," and bolted off into the fragrant night.

Alone in the moon-washed dark, I looked up at the group of stars that held Sol. They shone down, beautiful and pitiless, as they had for thousands of years and would for thousands more, with no end in sight.

ii.

YOUR DISSERTATION IS WRONG.

The words hung in glowing green phosphate on my black computer screen. For a moment I was stung–after all, I had just defended my dissertation to glowing praise that very afternoon. _Gauda Prime's Rebel History: An Exploration_. I was very proud of it. Then I realized it must be one of my friends, zapping me a chat message to try and kid me. Rather than let them get the best of me, I typed back, "Oh really? You don't say?"

INDEED I DO. THE BASIC FACTS ARE CORRECT, BUT BEYOND THAT YOU ARE SADLY IN ERROR.

"Please enlighten me. But try not to do it in all caps."

GAUDA PRIME WAS A REBEL BASE IN THE PAST. YOU ARE CORRECT ABOUT THAT. BUT NEITHER AVALON NOR SL'LOK EVER SET FOOT HERE.

"Fascinating."

YOU WISH TO KNOW THEIR NAMES? YOUR GHOSTS?

I had never told another soul about my friends in the woods. I froze.

I KNOW THEIR NAMES. I KNOW THEIR STORIES.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

COME TO THE WOODS TOMORROW AFTERNOON AT 0600 AND I SHALL ENLIGHTEN YOU.

AND BRING A PORTABLE RADIO THIS TIME, the anonymous chatter added abruptly, and said no more.

I was there at 0545, my state-of-the-art portable radio tucked in my backpack. As I entered the clearing where I had first met the juggler, the radio suddenly crackled to life without my intervention. I almost dropped the backpack. A dry, irritable voice snapped from the speakers.

"On time I see. Whatever your flaws, tardiness at least is not one of them." I pulled the radio out of my backpack and stared at it. "Yes, I am speaking to you. There is no need to gape at the transmitting device."

I tried to gather my academic dignity, already rather in tatters. "Who are you and what game is this?"

"It is no game. You wish answers to your questions, I wish...an errand done. A trade, not a game."

"What errand?" I couldn't figure out whether to address the radio or the air around me.

The speakers made an exasperated sighing noise. "I wish the ghosts laid to rest."

"They–they're really ghosts?"

"The correct technical term would be 'temporally and spatially bound necrosis-disrupted energy patterns.' But 'ghosts,' while less precise, saves time. Which we are running out of. Pick up the transmitter and walk due north."

Bemused and curious, I did so. The voice on the radio directed me through some thick underbrush to a small patch of land clear of trees. "Stop right here. Go no further. And wait." The question I was about to ask died on my lips as suddenly the ground ahead of me caved in. Dirt and stones rattled down a suddenly-revealed hatch. I stepped up and gazed into a long black tunnel leading straight down. Musty, cool air breathed from it.

"You expect me to go down this hole?"

"There is a ladder. There are some tasks, I have found to my chagrin, that having hands makes much easier."

"I don't mean I can't do it, I mean, why should I? I need some information first, Mr. Voice."

The speakers crackled with static. "The remains of your 'ghosts' lie below. Ghosts--temporallyandspatiallyboundnecrosisdisruptedenergypatterns–" it added in the tone of a footnote, "can usually be laid to rest one of two ways: by giving proper burial to their remains, and by naming their true names in a ceremony. I had hoped you could assist me, as you seem to have a connection to the patterns." In the tunnel, a line of lights blinked into existence. "Would improved lighting help?" The voice sounded almost concerned. I remembered the vague confusion of my juggler, the ghostly grace of the women, the anguish of the dark man.

I put the radio back into my backpack, then put my feet on the first rungs of the ladder and started down. "If you could open this hatch, why didn't you do this sooner?"

The radio's tinny voice echoed eerily in the tunnel. "He told me. 'If you don't hear from me or the others in an hour, seal all the doors and let no one in or out.' I asked him how long the base should remain sealed and he said, 'Until you hear from us. Or...I suppose six hundred years should do the trick.'" The voice's inflection and tone mimicked the dark man's voice patterns uncannily. "Today it has been six hundred years."

The rungs were cold and the air breathing past me was stale. Six hundred years. "So, why do you want these ghosts put to rest? What do you care?"

More crackling. "I wish to be left alone. The disrupted energy patterns are...distracting to have in the vicinity. Avon's in particular are highly unpleasant."

Avon. I made a mental note. The name meant nothing to me, however, and I was chagrined. Would I have to re-write my whole dissertation? The involuntary thought seemed suddenly ridiculous as I hung from a ladder leading into the depths of a forgotten rebel base, guided by a disembodied voice. I felt half-hysterical laughter creep up my throat.

"It sounds like he meant a lot to you," I noted after I got it under control. There was a brief silence, and the radio suddenly switched to a rat rock station. The raucous chords of Green Gunk bounced off the tunnel walls. I hate rat rock.

At the bottom of the shaft, I stepped down and something round grated and turned under my foot. I managed to keep from scurrying right back up the ladder, somehow. The lighting was dim but sufficient to make out a heap of bones, uniforms, and black helmets. The raucous music ceased. "None of them are here," said the radio. The only sounds were my own footsteps and the occasional terse command from my companion as we wound our way through a series of corridors and emerged into a large room.

Locating what I needed was an easy job. Apparently no living person had been in the room when the base doors had all sealed, because the bodies seemed undisturbed. Fortunately, six hundred years had left little but bones, easily identified by the clothing they still lay within–the same clothing my ghosts had been wearing for six centuries. The voice informed me I only needed fragments of bones. I tried not to think of the blonde woman's calloused, capable hands or the juggler's shy grin as I worked. These were not people, they were tibias and skulls. Not people.

The radio was silent as I wound my way back to the shaft, silent as I climbed the long ladder. In a clearing I scraped six shallow holes in the pine-needle-strewn ground and gently placed the bits of bone there. The morning sun slanted through the branches, dappling the graves. Far off I heard the plaintive, falling call of a songbird; all else was silent. I stood up and backed up a few paces. "What do I do now?"

I had expected some arcane ritual, some scratching of mystic symbols on the ground and invocation of spirits. "Name their names after me," was all the voice said. So we recited them together: Soolin, Dayna Mellanby, Del Tarrant, Vila Restal, Roj Blake, Kerr Avon. They appeared with their names. There was no angelic music, no lights, no drama at all, really. The ones named Blake and Avon merely clasped arms without speaking, unsmiling, but I could see the anguish and the fear lifting from them like morning mist from a lake. Then the others stepped forward together, and they were all gone into the pale sunlight.

I was alone in the woods of Gauda Prime with a silent radio.

iii.

This story has not been about my fate, but I will mention that although my dissertation is completely obsolete, the archeological work being done now at the old Gauda Prime rebel base has given me more than enough material to make up for the loss. My radio never speaks to me and no one shows up to bark at me in all caps in chat, but my computer did at one point suddenly download a large file of extremely useful, previously-lost historical documents. I think I've pieced together enough to figure out what it was that led me to the base, but I will leave that information out of my official publications.

As for my necrosis-disrupted energy patterns, there is not much left to tell. It would be little more than baseless speculation to mention that now and then in the woods of Gauda Prime, when the wind is just right, I think I can faintly catch the sound of quarreling and insults. It is often, but not always, accompanied by laughter. It sounds happy.

I've never seen anything again, though, and I am glad for it. Most of the time.


End file.
